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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Create custom icons and dollz.

I remember my predicament when I first stumbled on to the term ‘Avatar’ in one of ‘work from home’ forums way back in 1999.

Being in India, the word ‘Avatar’ has sacred implications for me but I was totally bemused when I was asked to create my avatar in that forum. It took some months for me to understand that it is used as the forum user’s representation. (smile)

As used for a computer representation of a user, the term dates at least as far back as 1985, when it was used as the name for the player character in the Ultima series of computer games’

The Ultima games started out in 1981, but it was in Ultima IV (1985), that the term "avatar" was introduced. To become the "avatar" was the goal of Ultima IV. The later games assumed that you were the avatar and "avatar" was the player's visual on-screen in-game persona.

The use of Avatar to mean online virtual bodies was popularised by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. In Snow Crash, the term Avatar was used to describe the virtual simulation of the human form in the Metaverse, a virtual-reality version of the Internet.

Internet forums were the first to use them for the purpose of representing users and their actions, personalizing their contributions to the forum, and may represent different parts of their persona or social status in the forum.

Though internet forums have several ready made avatars, for creative minded persons, Aim-dollz.com is a literally a virtual studio. One can create hundreds of thousands of Cartoon Dolls to be used in their web sites, blogs and in their chat windows.